ROBERT PARSONS' CLIMATE OF RESISTANCE AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT

Abstract

This synoptic essay explores trends in historical research and literary criticism on the theme of toleration. It surveys the current state of this lively field of enquiry and demonstrates how far the subject remains coloured by assumptions and narratives of change forged in the early modern era itself. It explores how tolerance and intolerance have been approached by intellectual and social historians and the implications of the recent growth of interest in religious tolerance and intolerance in the post-Reformation period among scholars of early modern literature. It highlights the conceptual problems and interpretative challenges that surround the subject and points towards the need for heightened sensitivity to the role and agency of language and texts, rhetorics and representations, in our analysis of the cultures of coexistence that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.     

Of burning monks,unidentified churches and the last Cistercian foundation in the East: Our Lady of Camina in the principality of Achaia

The existence of the monastic church of Camina in Frankish Morea has long been noted by historians of Frankish Greece, but its history has never been thoroughly investigated and its location remains unknown. Moreover, some of the documents pertaining to this church have not been published while others have been published in faulty editions that have obscured their full significance. In the present study the surviving documents are edited and the church's history is reconstructed and its location identified. It is suggested that some of the original Benedictine inhabitants of Camina were the only Latin religious to have been burnt at the stake for heresy in medieval Greece. It is also argued that Camina was the last Cistercian abbey to be founded in the Latin East, and that it may be identified as the present monastery of Our Lady of Blachernae near Glarenza (Killini).     

Heretical networks between East and West: the case of the Fraticelli

ABSTRACT

This article explores the links between the Franciscan heresy of the Fraticelli and the Latin territories of Greece in the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. It argues that the early involvement of Franciscan dissidents, like Angelo Clareno, with the lands of Latin Romania played an important role in the development of the Franciscan movement of dissent, on the one hand by allowing its enemies to associate them with the disobedient Greek Church and on the other by establishing havens where the dissidents were relatively safe from the persecution of the Inquisition and whence they were also able to send missionaries back to Italy to revive the movement there. In doing so, the article reviews all the known information about Fraticelli communities in Greece, and discovers two hitherto unknown references, demonstrating that the sect continued to exist in Greece during the Ottoman period, thus outlasting the Fraticelli communities of Italy.     

Embargoing ‘heretics' in fifteenth-century Central Europe: the case of Hussite Bohemia

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the embargo imposed by the papacy and the Catholic lay powers on all trade and commerce with the Czech Hussites. It posits that this anti-Hussite embargo was simultaneously a means of economic warfare and an expression of the longer tradition of the papal embargo. Based on this twofold understanding, a set of sources is interrogated both from the perspectives of economic and cultural history. To this end a research methodology is employed that differentiates between the instrumental and symbolic dimensions of agency. This allows for a new, holistic view of the anti-Hussite embargo, both as an instrumental means of warfare and as a communicative process. The article thus contributes to political, economic and cultural history as much as to the history of everyday life in fifteenth-century Central Europe. Above all, however, it offers a transferable research methodology for the study of medieval embargoes in general.     

New evidence on the origins of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls from a forgotten Paduan manuscript

This article examines an overlooked fifteenth-century document which attacks and refutes 35 extracts from a Latin copy of the condemned fourteenth-century work The Mirror of Simple Souls. It gives an overview of the document's origins, provenance and contents, and then discusses how certain omissions in the text's source citations have crucial implications for more firmly establishing the date of origin for the Latin translation of the Mirror.